This is one live case study on how to recover lost data from one Hitachi laptop hard drive.

This hard drive was undetected at pc at all when the engineer was connected to DFL-DDP, the hard drive can get ready and the hard drive was found successfully without any unusual noises.However, when the engineer tried to scan the hard drives, the programs output source drive ID read error and the error status register was on. At this time, the engineer couldn’t do anything further. The only choice is to fix the drive first. The engineer went to the DDP Hitachi common firmware solution section and select the 2.5″ virtual translator function. The engineer selected the right hitachi family 5450A7 and select to load from head 0. It takes about 16 seconds to complete the operation.

For such kind of Hitachi patient hard drives, users need to disable the auto soft/hard reset and power reset, otherwise, it may go back to the original patient status.

Due to the unstable drive working status, sometimes, users need to use the virtual translator fix for one more time or more times until the recovery is successful.